Can't say I'm anticipated let alone excited about this year. The way I see it, this year isn't going to be too different from the previous years. But for the sake of politeness I bid you and everyone else A Happy New Year.

This "twenty ten" vs "two thousand (and) ten" (for some reason, us English say 'and' after a thousand or hundred), is a debatable thing.

Some people say that, although we say this year is "two thousand (and) nine", when we are in the year 2042 we'll pronounce it "twenty forty-two" and refer to the years 2000-2009 as "twenty oh something" ... yes "September 11th two thousand (and) one" could become "September 11th twenty oh one", and 2000 could be "twenty hundred".

Honestly, I probably won't stick to either next year. They're both acceptable.

The Ultimate Koopa reminds me of another thing that will be awkward. How will we refer to this decade as a whole? The "ohs"? The "ots"? The ones? It seems like whenever I've referred to the 190x decade, I haven't been sure what to say. In the coming years I'll confront this problem more often...

I also notice, and perhaps it's just because of the modern age, we always refer to, say, the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, etc. I often say I like movies that take place in the '20s or the '30s. We've often don't need to say "the 1920s", since it was assumed, because we hardly ever talk about decades in general before the twentieth century. Now we'd have to specify, because soon when you say the '20s, you may think of the 1920s or the 2020s...

Okay, I guess it's not that big of a deal, though it just seems to me that recorded history before the 20th century always seems kind of vague and slow-developing that you'd refer to centuries as a whole rather than decades...it's the 1700s or the 1800s, that kind of thing. You can tell, through fashion and technology, the differences between the 1950s and the 1980s but I wouldn't be able to tell you the difference between the 1780s and the 1820s.

Anyway, yeah, back to Revned's point, it's not only this decade that's hard to refer to, it's the next. While the "ohs" (though awkward, and fits best if you actually call the years "oh"-something) and the "twenties" both make sense, the "tens" or the "teens" sound weird to me because they don't accurately explain what you call the years, as while you can say "twenty-something" or "thirty-something" you don't say "ten-something" or "teen-something". Though we know they're included and it's just the way the English language is, "2011" and "2012" do not have either "ten" or "teen" in them...

Maybe we should just take a cue from the Mega Man series and go with 200X and 20XX... (I like how with Homestar Runner they actually pronounce 20X6 as "Twenty Exty-Six"...)

Then you have all those people who debate as to whether the decades begin with XXX0 or XXX1. Everyone made a big deal when the year 2000 started (even without mentioning the Y2K bug), but no one seemed to care when 2001 rolled around. If we are to believe that the current calendar system's numerology is correct (I've heard theories that there are 700 years missing but that's yet another issue altogether) and that we don't count a year 0, that it goes from 1 BC straight to 1 AD, then yes, the new millenium began in 2001 and every decade begins at XXX1, not XXX0. But one number flipping on the dial isn't as exciting as all four, I guess.

Or, we could use the Chinese calendar. On Jan. 26, it'll be the year 4706. Which sounds all cool and futuristic, even though it's not.

You know how we refer to the 1920s as being between 1920 - 1929, the 1970s as 1970-1979?

When we say the 1900s? Does that mean 1900-1909, or 1900-1999?

That is is "The nineteen hundreds" the years from "nineteen hundred" to "nineteen oh nine", or "nineteen hundred" to "nineteen ninety-nine"?

And not that anyone us will be alive then <_< >_> how will extremely distant future years be pronounced? Like the year 74,154? At the moment we seperate the year in groups of a maximum of 2.

763 is "seven sixty-three". 1176 is "eleven seventy-six". Will we do the same thing with 74,154? Like seperate it into 7 41 and 54 and call it "seven forty-one fifty-four"? And what about 6,523,134? Will that be "six fifty-two thirty-one thirty-four"?

I'd bet that by the time we reach 10,000 AD, there won't be any language that remotely sounds like modern English. In fact, the English of 1,000 AD is incomprehensible to us (hence the need for translations of Beowulf).

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"its a good day to do what has to be done by me and help my brother to defeat the enemys" - John Freeman

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